Fever: A Novel

by Mary Beth Keane

“There was an accident, Mary. A fire. A lamp exploded in his hands and he got badly burned. He was in Willard Parker for months, and then at a hospital for burned people up in Harlem.”

  Mary shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

  “I found out only because I got so curious I went over to the stable one afternoon to see if they’d seen him. They said it happened right there, at the stable, just before Christmas in 1910.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Then when he got out of the burn place he came down here looking for me, looking for work, I guess, but there wasn’t nothing to give him. So I says to him, ‘Briehof, what you should do is head west to one of the middle states. Good work there. Make yourself a little house.’ And I swear to God, Mary, I think he did it. I think he just went and did it, just like that. Crazy as a loon, that guy. You didn’t seem to want to talk about him so I told Patricia to tell you. I know you two don’t get on so well but I figured she’d told you or told Fran to tell you and you ladies had talked about it and decided what to think about it. And then I figured he’d write to you. He asked about you, you know.”

  “No. No, Patricia didn’t tell me.”

  Jimmy picked up his sandwich, and offered half to Mary. She took it gratefully.

  “Where’s the hospital?”

  “West 127th, I think. Maybe 128th. Between Broadway and Amsterdam.”

  “Maybe they know where he went. Maybe they have an address.”

  “I doubt it, Mary. When he came to see me it was November. Six months ago. And then if he headed west . . .”

  How could he have traveled so far away without telling her? How could he have been so badly hurt without her knowing? They sat in silence, looking up at the top of the skyscraper. “Fifty-five stories,” Jimmy said. “You believe that?”

  Mary could just make out the shape of a man on one of the beams near the top.

  “But he was all right? Recovered? How bad was he burned?”

  “Pretty bad. But he was better when I saw him.”

  “Why didn’t Patricia tell me? You should have double-checked, Jimmy. You should have known Patricia wouldn’t tell me. I have a good mind to go up there and tell her what I think of her.”

  Jimmy sighed. “Don’t take it up the wrong way, Mary, please. We have enough trouble.”

  • • •

  The burn hospital was newer than the buildings surrounding it, the stonework not yet blackened. She expected something like Willard Parker, or like Riverside, but it was a modest building, four stories, no sign of its purpose except for a small placard over the door with simple letters: St. John the Apostle Burn Recovery Hospital of Morningside Heights. There were trees lining the street and a group of young girls clustered around a toy pram. Mary rang the bell, and the door was answered by a nun dressed entirely in white. The nun ushered her into the small, marble-floored reception area. The halls were silent, and Mary glanced quickly up the stairs, at a large, stained-glass window on the landing between the first and second floors. Aside from Central Park, where it was possible to hear birds and crickets in summer, and aside from North Brother, it was the quietest place Mary had ever visited in Manhattan.

  “I’m looking for a patient named Alfred Briehof,” Mary said to the nun in a whisper. The sound of a bed being rolled on casters echoed from an upper floor. “I know he’s been released, but I wondered if you had an address for him.”

  “Briehof,” the nun said. “Excuse me.”

  Bending her head so that Mary could not see the expression below her habit, the nun turned to a desk and pulled open a lower drawer. She ran her fingers across the names at the top of the files. Forward and back her fingers crawled. She closed the drawer and opened another, ran her fingers again.

  “Briehof,” she announced, pulling a file out of the drawer. “Released,” she said once she’d looked it over. “Let’s see here. Yes, back in November. Pardon me. What is your relationship?” She glanced at Mary’s bag, which she’d placed on a bench in the waiting area.

  Mary cleared her throat. “I’m his sister. Just found out about the accident. I’m visiting New York and this is the last place I have for him.”

  “I see,” the nun turned back to the file and Mary prayed that it didn’t note anywhere that he was German. She considered what she’d say if the nun asked Mary to explain how brother and sister could have different accents.

  “He signed himself out.”

  “Is there a new address?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  Mary sighed. “Was he very bad?” The nun tipped the file so that it would flap open again.

  “Hard to say,” she said after a moment of reading. “He was here for several months. That’s a long time. On the other hand, he’s alive. He left.”

  “Yes,” Mary whispered. It was true. “Does it say anything about him going out west? To find work?”

  The nurse shook her head. “No, but if he left the area that would explain why he missed his follow-up appointments. Patients with his injuries usually come in to get new prescriptions once a month.” Mary thought of all the states he’d ever mentioned wanting to see. How would she find him now?

  A piece of paper slid out of the file and onto the floor.

  “Wait,” the nun said. She read the sheet that had fallen. “I see. He stopped in just a few weeks ago with a few complaints. You were right. He’d been in Minnesota for a few months, but he returned just a few weeks ago and the doctor gave him new prescriptions. It references that he lives on 125th Street, but it doesn’t say East or West or any building number.”

  The nun turned the paper over to check the back. “I suppose you could try the doctor’s office. Explain that you’re his sister.” The nun took a pencil from her pocket and scribbled the doctor’s address on a corner of the paper and then tore the corner off.

  “Thank you.”

  “I assume you already tried his next of kin?”

  “Who?”

  “His wife. I imagine she knows where he is. Though seeing her address now I wonder why he isn’t living with her. Perhaps their situation changed due to his injury.”

  “His wife?” Mary tried to control her expression. “It’s been several years since I’ve seen my brother.”

  “Well, he listed a wife when he was admitted,” the nun glanced down. “A Mary Mallon of East Thirty-Third Street.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  When Alfred woke, he was on his back, a pillow tucked under his head, another under his arm. A small, square window. A distant ceiling. A closed door. He shifted his leg and gasped at the pain it brought. Part of his body was covered with gauze. There was a lamp on the table beside his bed and he tried to turn toward it. He lifted his right arm and felt a brilliant heat light up inside his body and blossom forward, pushing out from his muscle and bone.

  When he opened his eyes again there was a nurse looking at him from behind a clipboard. He opened and closed his eyes several times. Sometimes it was light in the room, sometimes dark. Sometimes a man was watching him, sometimes a woman, usually no one at all. In the background there were sounds: shoes scuffing a linoleum floor, people talking in low voices, the squeaking wheels of a rolling cart. But instead of interrupting the silence, the atmosphere of total stillness, of nothingness, that sensation of floating through an in-between place, the noises only emphasized the void, drew attention to it, and after every small bump or rattle the world seemed even quieter than before.

  Several times a day, from somewhere so near his body he knew he could reach out and touch it if he could make his body work, was the delicate tink of glass, and the unmistakable flick of a finger, once, twice, and then a pinprick, usually in the crook of his elbow, sometimes in his forearm, occasionally the back of his hand. After a moment—one, two, three—he felt a small quiver at his center, pressure on his chest and head that lasted just long enough for him to begin feeling panic, and then peace, as if someone had warmed a blanket by the stove and pulled it up over him, tucked it
in at his shoulders and turned out the light. It was a feeling like being born, a baby tucking chin to chest and pushing into that dark tunnel, or the lead weight used to plumb a depth, and the prize was reaching that destination, finding the depth, and sometimes he felt the sea rocking under his bed. He heard the sound of the ocean. He heard his mother’s voice, took in the smell of the Alps, German grass under his feet, German air. Then, as if he’d taken one giant leap across a continent and ocean, he was in New York, a mountain of coal behind him, Mary on the other side of a gate, Mary stirring a pot with her back to the room, Mary unpinning her hair and shaking it loose. He spoke to his father. He spoke to his brother. He laughed with Mary as they danced in Coney Island, in Hoboken, in Manhattan. He whisked her across the gleaming black-and-white floor of his hospital room. He was seven years old and there were thin slices of pine strapped to his feet. He was fifteen and strong, dodging a policeman on Mercer. He was forty and tired, but summoning the strength to get up and start again.

  Eventually, there were things he knew, and so somebody must have told him, though he couldn’t think of who or when. Time stretched and stretched until it snapped: an hour felt like a week, and then a week felt like a day. He knew it was the new year, but then the nurse put a hand on Alfred’s cheek and told him it was the Ides of March. March already. Almost spring. He was in a hospital. He’d been badly burned. There was some question about whether he’d use his right arm again: everything below the elbow had been destroyed almost to the muscle. His upper chest on that side was in better shape, but there was still a risk of infection. Had he spoken to them? They asked him questions sometimes, and waited for answers. How do you feel? What exactly happened? Don’t you know how lucky you are?

  They fed him. They washed his body. Catholic? He’d nodded, yes, he guessed he probably was, but had he ever been baptized? He’d been to Mass a few times, with Mary and her aunt Kate. A priest came to offer the Eucharist one Sunday and he opened his mouth to accept it. After, he had bad dreams about them finding out and putting him on the street, but he continued to accept it, Sunday after Sunday, and eventually he looked forward to the priest’s visit, the knobby hand he always placed on Alfred’s head before leaving. On Easter Sunday they brought him lamb with mint jelly and fed him in forkfuls small enough for a child. On the Fourth of July they told him to look toward his window, where he could see flashes of blue, pink, bright white sparklers rising up and landing somewhere nearby. He could hear birds, and then, after a few weeks, the birds disappeared. Spring and summer had come and left again.

  They told him he was getting better. He had no infection. He’d be able to use his arm one day though it would not be pleasant to look at. His nerves had been badly burned and yes, that was bad news, but on the other hand it meant he wouldn’t feel pain there anymore. He was being moved. It would be uncomfortable but they’d give him something for it.

  The burn hospital was uptown, they’d told him. It was a charity hospital, run by nuns, all of whom had vowed to live in service to St. John the Apostle. They didn’t expect anything in return. A donation, perhaps, whatever he could spare. It was in a quiet neighborhood. Quieter than this? He’d asked, and they laughed. “Something for the journey,” the nurse had said, and he closed his eyes to listen for the tink, tink of the little glass vial.

  There were trees outside his window at St. John’s. Their shadows swayed on his wall when the wind blew. The nuns wanted him to walk more, to do laps around the hallway. They wanted him to practice lifting a teacup, gripping a fork, washing himself. He complained of itching all over his body. He vomited. He didn’t like it there. He wanted to go back to Willard Parker. They gave him his medicine by tablet—two round white pills three times a day that he placed on his tongue and tipped back into his throat before the nun could pass him a cup of water. The pills helped, eventually, but not like the needle. The needle sent him floating from the very instant it punctured his skin. Syringes were expensive, a nurse explained, and they were a charity hospital. They had to use what they were given: morphine, opium, codeine, cocaine, heroin. Tablets, tinctures, salts for sniffing. It was all the same, all for managing pain. They wanted to be a bit careful about the morphine, they told him. In the past, they’d noticed several patients had difficulty weaning after they were healed. Several doctors suggested cocaine or heroin instead. They usually brought him a tincture of opium after supper, and he swallowed every bitter drop, but he couldn’t sleep in so much silence. The groaning of the trees kept him up all night. It was too cold at St. John’s, and when it wasn’t too cold it was too warm. He was getting worse.

  “You are not getting worse,” a nun informed him in a subdued voice. “You have healed wonderfully. It’s been more than ten months since the accident.” He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. Didn’t they realize the extent of his injuries? Even when he finally slept it was not restful, and only when he began howling through the night, waking the other patients, did a harried doctor appear with a needle and syringe. After, he was serene. He slept. They added the nightly injection to his bedtime routine.

  He spent afternoons trying to make his way around the corridors and he wondered at his old self, how he always seemed to be on his way somewhere, itching to get free of whatever room he was in. Now, even with so little to do, the days passed quickly and sweetly. He walked. He rested. He considered the shadows on the wall. He closed his eyes and listened. He returned to his room for his medicine and noted that he never had to even look at a clock. His body told him when it was time, and sure enough, usually within a minute of returning to his room, resting at the edge of his bed, someone would appear with a white cup, and he took anything they gave him as he anticipated the after-supper hour when the doctor would appear with the syringe.

  In November, they told him he was ready, that he should start planning. Was there a job to get back to? Someone to contact? Crystal Springs had given him a settlement of one hundred dollars, which by some miracle the hospital hadn’t taken from him. He left twenty-five dollars to the nuns. On the morning of his discharge they shaved him, cut his hair, gave him a suit of clothes, a hat, shoes, a small container of tablets for the pain. A doctor named Tropp who kept hours at the hospital, and had his own office nearby, would prescribe something else if the tablets didn’t do the job. If he ran out of medicine and Dr. Tropp was unavailable, he should go to a pharmacy and ask for something. Any druggist would give him a tincture of opium or a small dose of heroin until the doctor could see him.

  When he got outside to the street for the first time in eleven months, he walked immediately to Dr. Tropp’s office. He told the doctor that the nuns had given him pills, but that at night he needed something stronger. Just as he’d hoped, Dr. Tropp asked if he was familiar with administering medicine by needle. “Of course,” Alfred said. Once Alfred had paid, the doctor handed over a small bag containing a single glass syringe, two needles, several vials of liquid morphine, a prescription for more. Back on the sidewalk, Alfred placed the bag carefully in his jacket pocket. He climbed the long staircase to the El platform and protected his pocket as the train pulled in and the other riders pushed against him. His arm was ugly but worked just fine. He could grasp a fork, turn a knob. Sometimes it ached and felt tired. They had shown him exercises to make the muscle stronger, but he found the medicine was the best to help that feeling of lopsidedness, of tightness on one side and looseness on the other. The medicine was an equalizer and made his whole body the same, his thoughts peaceful and quiet and the days kind. His chest was taut, like the skin there had shrunk, but the medicine helped that, too. With the medicine he felt at ease, and he moved along the paper-strewn streets in an even rhythm, throwing one foot loosely in front of the other, feeling the momentum of his arms swinging by his side. Even his head felt perched perfectly at the top of his neck. At Thirty-Fourth Street he climbed the stairs to the street, walked south one block, and then across, all the way east, until he spotted the old building. He halted, brushed
his pocket to make sure nothing had been damaged. He moved a little closer, and then sat down on a stoop.

  Was she still at the same laundry? Still staying with Mila? It wasn’t long before he saw her, walking up Third Avenue from the opposite direction, a young boy on either side of her. They were talking, competing for her attention, and she was serious with them though Alfred could see that whatever they were saying, she was happy. She was holding a box. She placed her hand on the head of the shorter boy, and he took the box from her. The two boys ran ahead and she shouted something after them. She touched her collar, the back of her hair. She looked young. Nowhere was that put-upon expression she used to wear, that hard look she got when she moved around him in their rooms, running a rag across the counter, closing her mind to the fact that he was there. If he washed a pan he should have scoured it. If he put away the sugar, she found some he’d spilled on the floor. He was useless. He was lazy. He was a drunk. He didn’t love her. He didn’t know the half of what she did for him.

  “Alfred,” she used to say, more softly than she ever spoke when he was sober. “You have to stop this.”

  She quickened her step, and Alfred walked out to the middle of the sidewalk. She was directly across the street now. If she turned her head, she’d see him there. Do it now, he told himself. Now. But he just watched her, and then she was gone, disappeared into the building and up the stairs.

  • • •

  Driscoll was dead, the Lower East Side was off-limits in case he would run into Liza, so Alfred paid the bartender to sleep on a cot in the back room of Nation’s for a night. He had no desire to have a drink, and again wondered at his old self. The next morning, he went downtown to talk to Jimmy Tiernan. Jimmy knew someone who knew someone who’d gotten work in Minnesota, clearing land, and who said it was the best work he’d ever had in his life. Hard work, but good work. Clean air. No punch card. No boss breaking balls every minute. Jimmy wanted to go there himself, but Patricia would never agree to it. They could build a log house—three, four, five rooms, however many they wanted. They could clear land and sell the timber. They could keep livestock. Plant crops. But the farthest Patricia would go was Queens. He laughed. “But you,” he said to Alfred, “what’s stopping you? Go in the spring, when the weather isn’t so bad.”